The study investigates the potential of AI-powered plush robots to serve as assistive technologies for children with Autistic Spectrum Disorder (ASD) within educational and rehabilitation settings. It employed a qualitative research approach, utilizing semi-structured interviews with 13 experts from related fields to gather insights into the…

In comparison to children and young students, adult learners usually exhibit more complex learning behaviors and psychological needs during the learning process. Designing social robots for adult learners has, thus, been a challenging task and a far less explored area, and it requires the great efforts from both technical and theoretical…

Preschool children (aged 5-6 years) in Singapore learn science by discovering, inquiring, and investigating things that interest them in their daily lives. One approach involves learning science through building and exploring robots based on the Artec robotics curriculum, developed by an established Japanese education provider, Artec Co., Ltd.…

There is a worldwide trend to include engineering design in high school curricula as a bridge course to higher-level STEM education and to increase high school students' interest in STEM fields. This study used a battlebot design curriculum to compare engineering design learning between high school and college first-year students and then proposed…

Fostering students' competence in applying interdisciplinary knowledge to solve problems has been recognized as an important and challenging issue globally. This is why STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering, Mathematics) education has been emphasized at all levels in schools. Meanwhile, the use of robotics has played an important role in STEM…

Nowadays, technology has become dominant in the daily lives of most people around the world. Technology is present from children to older people, helping in the most diverse daily tasks and allowing accessibility. However, many times these people are just end-users, without any incentive to develop computational thinking (CT). With advances in…

In the current investigation, we used a single case alternating treatments design to evaluate the effects of a robot prompter on the social interaction of three pairs of children with autism spectrum disorder (ASD). Findings suggest that three participants produced more utterances and conversational turns when a robot prompter was present, and two…

This paper reports findings from a study where regional, rural, and remote (RRR) educators were involved in a Queensland Government-funded 3-year Central Queensland (CQ) STEM (science, technology, engineering, and mathematics) Cluster Project designed to enhance student learning opportunities. This project provided STEM professional development,…

Productive collaborative learning and the utilization of educational robots as a tool for developing conceptual understanding and promoting student engagement and interest levels are considered crucial components of our teaching and learning environments. This is becoming more prevalent with the rise of making spaces where collaboration is a key…

This article illustrates that the task design and problem selection are of characteristic influence to evoke sense-reason-act programming (SRA) among primary school pupils when programming robots. Research shows that the task design influences the development of computational thinking (CT). The literature provides evidence that the context, the…

In this qualitative case study, we examined in-service elementary school teachers' learning of coding and robotics in a blended professional learning course developed and delivered through the collaboration between university faculty and a school district. We focused on activity theory to understand and reveal the mediations, conflicts, and…

Working collaboratively in groups can positively impact performance and student engagement. Intelligent social agents can provide a source of personalized support for students, and their benefits likely extend to collaborative settings, but it is difficult to determine how these agents should interact with students. Reinforcement learning (RL)…

Over the past two decades, educators and policymakers have expressed growing concerns over the low levels of math and science achievement among American students and the gradual decline in the numbers of young people moving into science, technology, engineering, and math (STEM) careers. While interest in expanding the numbers of young people…

The delivery of science, technology, engineering and mathematics (STEM) learning to improve an individual's competence and future career interests has become a critical scientific undertaking for teachers and researchers alike. A plethora of research has proposed various hands-on robotics activities built on constructivist theories, thereby…

Robotics education has received widespread attention in K-12 education. Studies have pointed out that in robotics courses, learners face challenges in learning abstract content, such as constructing a robot with a good structure and writing programs to drive a robot to complete specific learning tasks. The present study proposed the embodied…